What is Operational Transformation

For all e-collaboration systems, some degree of concurrency control is needed so that two people do not step on each other’s foot. The demand for good concurrency control is especially high for the tightly coupled, real-time e-collaboration systems. Such systems require quick responses to user’s actions, and typically require a WYSIWIS (what you see is what I see) graphical user interface (Ellis, Gibbs, & Rein, 1991). This requirement, together with the fact that users are often separated geographically across wide-area networks, favors a decentralized system design where the system state is replicated at each user’s site. This places further challenges on the design of concurrency control for these systems.